But from the top of the mountain there is no longer anywhere to go but down. And the air may be so thin at that altitude that it makes thinking clearly about the future difficult.
I've been playing WoW since beta (blah, blah), but I predict that in a few years we'll look back on the announcement of the forthcoming expansion as the peak in the life of WoW.
Note that in the past they announced subscriber numbers in even millions but now we have this 9.3 number. What's gone wrong that they didn't hit 10 million? After all, they've been continuously releasing the game into new markets over the last few years, so there has been a constant source of new players to help inflate the subscriber numbers.
WoW in the U.S. has been in decline for several months now. While there are many die-hard players who have been there for three years or more and will likely be playing WoW five years from now, there are also many many player who have gotten bored and have either moved on, or are now ready for a "next big thing" to come along at which point they'll jump so fast it will make Blizzards' heads spin.
There is an enormous potential opening in the market resulting from Blizzard's stumble. The window will likely last a year or two until Blizzard realizes they're in trouble and does something about it. It will be interesting to see if any of next year's big challengers is able to capitalize on this. Games like Age of Conan or Warhammer have a big opportunity, but will they be able to take advantage of it?
One of the biggest problems with new games (Lord of the Rings Online is a perfect example) is that in many cases they copy so much from WoW as to be almost indistinguishable from it. Someone who has gotten tired of WoW is unlikely to be inspired by a poor clone of it.
Blizzard has all the talent required to get back on track, but I think a significant shakeup in their design group will be needed. They can't just keep pushing another identical 10-level grind + new endgame raiding content on people every 18 months and expect them not to notice that it's just the same thing all over again.
The announcement of the new forthcoming expansion turned a lot of people off as simply being more level and gear inflation that will invalidate everything they've accomplished so far and make them go through the whole process again. Especially those people who were brought into gaming for the first time by WoW.
More of the same is no longer a recipe for success, and the new subscriber numbers suggest that the engines on the high-flying Blizzard ship have flamed out. Whether they can recognize this and get themselves restarted by coming up with something NEW will have to be seen.
If there's one thing that WoW suffers from it's the word "static". Everything is fixed, very little is dynamic. Dungeons are exactly the same every time you run them, and you need a fixed number of people and skills to beat them. Imagine if the dungeon layouts were randomly generated each time and the monsters and rewards automatically scaled to the number of people in the party and their abilities? In my opinion, it's only through major changes like this that Blizzard has any hope of returning to a growing subscriber base.
...at least those flames will be beautifully rendered at incredibly high resolution and we'll all go "oooohhhhhh! ahhhhhhhhh!" as it plows into the ground and erupts in a huge fireball.
Sorry, I RTFA and it was the worst heap of rubbish I've read all day.
It's author seems to be utterly and completely clueless about everything mentioned.
There's not a single thing that justifies the word "tying" that I can see. Microsoft have some OPTIONAL add-on set of services that you can install if you feel like it. It's not mandatory and they're not saying it will be. It's no more "tied" to Windows than any other piece of software.
I think I'm going to start a blog where I too post nonsensical tech stories with headlines solely designed to push the buttons of reactionary Slashdot readers, then clean up on the Google ad income.
It seems that almost all gadgets introduced as being a "new class" of device can be found a year later being sold by the pallet-load at bay area surplus and auction places. A year from now we can go in together on a lot of 100 of them for $1 each:)
The only question now is whether they show up at Weird Stuff Warehouse or BDI:-)
Seriously, this might be the most embarrassing product announcement I've ever seen.
A $600 minimalist Linux notebook that's a peripheral for a $300-$600 phone.
Joy.
At 2.4 pounds it's as massive as an ordinary ultralight notebook that could run a full OS and applications. The sort of person would would go for this will already be likely to have a real notebook PC with them that can do all these same functions as well or better than this device.
It seems that almost all gadgets introduced as being a "new class" of device can be found a year later being sold by the pallete-load at bay area surplus and auction places. A year from now we can go in together on a lot of 100 of them for $1 each:)
...is simply that an MMO carries a monthly fee whereas the traditional games like Diablo and Starcraft included free online play once you bought the game.
Blizzard/Vivendi have gotten a taste of blood from the monthly revenue from 8 million WoW players and I predict they will not be introducing any new games that do not have a pay-per-month component.
So I would expect Starcraft/Diablo 3 to come out as online games where you pay $5-$10/month or something and in exchange you get a more dynamic multi-player environment than the standalone games but nothing quite as elaborate as WoW.
You wonder if this will be on the pre-MRI questionaire soon. I guess as soon as a patient's hand flys through the window and smacks the operator in the face.
You might erase your credit cards everytime you hand one to someone.
And you'll never get rid of those damn iron filings.
VB was a great beginner's language (when it was version 1.0 and was clean and simple and fully documented in a couple of relatively thin manuals that came in the box). But now the beginner may be overwhelmed by the available functionality and the documentation is now hundreds of megabytes of text available electronically.
Of course the same thing can be said about Java 1.0, and early versions of pretty much every similar language. As people demand to be able to do everything in a programming system it will eventually be come almost unusably complex no matter how simple and clean the original design and the first version were.
If someone wants to be a Windows programmer, or especially a professional VB programmer, then they have to start somewhere and VB is probably a fine starting place for someone moving into the world of Windows programming.
If you're interested in programming in general with less of a "Windows GUI Apps" concentration then there are lots of (probably better) options.
One I like to recommend for kids to get them into the basics of programming is POV-Ray for Windows which provides a very nice little IDE for writing programs that produce beautiful pictures when run. You can give a kid a program that draws a shiny sphere floating over a checkered landscape and then show them how to code a loop to make it 100 randomly positioned spheres, etc. and leave them to experiment with making changes to the program and seeing how that affects the output. Way more interesting than your average "Hello World!" in a window.
I concede, things are not bright sunshine and frolicking puppies for the gaming industry at the moment.
Nintendo seems to be doing quite well with the frolicking puppies, and it's always a sunny day in World of Warcraft (at least until the next patch that adds weather effects).
OMFG! Giant Killer Toads taking over Australia! Say it isn't so!
Honestly, is this actually news to anyone?
You can learn pretty much everything you would ever want to know about the relationship between Cane Toads and the people of Australia in this delightful little movie:
Any such game is definitely in the "fantasy" genre:-)
We hear this "user created content is the future" thing like every three months, and I think it's nonsense.
Sure, everyone would like to create a "Hello World!" MMOG and sit back and watch the players turn it into World of Warcraft.
Ha ha. Fat chance.
I'm still waiting for the glass I broke yesterday to reassemble itself spontaneously too.
Most players don't have that much imagination, most player created content will be crud (like 95% of everything), and even if it were good there's no way it would be *consistent*.
Sure, you might get a strong volunteer leader and an open-source style development success, but then you've just suckered people into working for you for free so I wouldn't really be betting my business plan on that happening, especialy if you're charging them $10/month for the privilege.
Look at the success of a game like World of Warcraft (5,000,000+ players at up to $15/month each) and then look at what went into creating that world (a huge five year development effort by hundreds of people). Now everyone wants in on that success but nobody wants to spend the time and money to do it right, so you get all these suggestions that user created content is the solution.
It will probably sucker in quite a few investors who think they're going to get WoW for free, but I'll be pretty surprised if anyone has a big success with it.
Yes, there *are* many very talented players out there, many who have better ideas than many game developers, but the trick is filtering the smart ones from the stupid ones, creating some sort of centralized continuity control to ensure consistency, etc.
One of the most critical things to any functional MMOG these days is creating and protecting an in-game economy. When you're letting players create the content that sounds even more difficult if you have to prevent any sort of exploit that would allow unbalancing the economy.
It's a fun fantasy, but I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you for saying what I was really tempted to:-)
Never has an article on./ screamed so loudly for a response that included multiple instances of the word "fuck" (and all its various forms) as this one did.
I think I'll pass on renewing my/. subscription for now.
Does Battlefield 2 include improved terrain/building damage? Indeed, such things will be the hallmark of future games.
No, unfortunately not.
You can put a tank round into a gas station and get nothing.
<marvin> Where's the kaboom? THERE OUGHT TO BE AN EARTH SHATTERING KABOOM! </marvin>
Anyway, the expansion which has already been announced is supposed to improve this somewhat, but in BF2 today there are only a handful of small items that you can actually damage.
It amazes me that people keep suggesting that BF2 is this great example of what makes PC gaming better than console gaming.
I am a PC gamer and while I own most of the consoles, I never turn them on because I prefer the PC experience and my high-resolution cutting-edge graphics to playing on a "tee vee".
But Battlefield 2 was clearly designed from day one TO BE A CONSOLE GAME! Just look at the user interface. It's designed to be operated by a console-style game controller without any need for a keyboard, mouse, or any of the rest of the PC user interface.
The primary communication interface consists of a button-triggered popup menu of canned messages, and keyboard-based chat looks like an afterthought.
The user experience for this game will be identical in its console ports, and not because the consoles will be made to behave like PCs, but because the designers of this game went to a fair amount of trouble to make the PC behave just like a console.
The game may look better on today's PCs when compared to today's consoles, but this is simply due to the more modern (and several times more expensive) hardware in a current gaming PC. There may be other reasons why PC gaming is better than console gaming, but BF2 presents no examples (that I can see) of why this might be the case.
BF2 *is* a great game though, and is the first game of its type that actually convinced me to buy it.
When I heard about this a couple months ago it was of course a new and uniqe gadget and so I couldn't resist ordering one. Got the second set of keys and a spare plastic top panel so you can swap between a couple key layouts quickly.
The hardware is well made, the keys are high quality, and the software works fine (running under XP SP2 on a Dell gaming laptop).
I haven't done that much with it really yet. I think the problem with the device is that it basically does a good job of putting a lot of buttons within reach of your hand, but then a $10 keyboard also does an excellent job of doing this.
But the product does what it claims to, so if you want lots of customizable buttons I would have no reservations about recommending the Ergodex.
The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come,[...]
The problem with all of these endless new tape technologies is that after they come they (or their vendors) tend to become lethargic and lose interest in the whole process so that six months later they're trying to sell you yet another replacement technology.
That's fine for something like a computer that can run the same software each generation, but for tape devices the need to change media is like having to re-code your application in a new language every time you upgrade the computer. People don't want to do it.
Most customers want a backup media that will still be viable in at least seven years because of legal requirements. That can mean needing to be able to buy a drive that can read their tapes 5-12 years from now. How many of these new tape technologies will have that kind of staying power?
The standard 9-track 2400 foot open reel tape served the computer industry for about 30 years, providing a standard storage and interchange mechanism for pretty much every computer larger than a PC. The Internet has rendered the need for an interchange mechanism less critical, but the instability in the archival storage formats is now giving people serious headaches.
POV is one of the greatest free software programs available, but people usually look at it the wrong way (IMHO).
What stops people generally is that it has no visual modeling facility. This leads people to believe that it is only good as a renderer where the input is created by some visual modeling tool like Moray, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While you certainly can use POV as an ordinary backend renderer, the true fun and power of the program comes with hand-written scene description files.
Yes, hand-written.
You can accomplish in 20 lines of POV code things that would take hours with a visual modeling interface. It's all about procedural descriptions rather than visual construction. Take some time and look through the many excellent sample scenes that are included, then start out by making small changes to the code and rendering them to see how it looks with your change.
Most of the best images created with POV were not done using a modeling program but hand written scene descriptions.
POV is a programming language for scenes the way C is a programming language for computer programs, and it really is a full-blown programming language (though a little unusual in places I will admit).
While things like modeling complex organic forms (the human body for example) are generally impractical to do procedurally, you can do just about anything else this way, and often much more easily and with more control than you would have positioning a lot of points in space iwth a modeling program.
And if you have any interest in the more abstract artistic kind of compositions, you can do just amazing things in a single page of POV code. The ability to use conditional and looping stuctures along with macros and functions in your scene description gives you amazing power.
And as far as GUIs go, at least POV for Windows has one of the best designed and most functional GUI interfaces that I've used. It's not a modeler, but as an interface to the POV renderer and even as a general purpose code editor it is superb.
One of POV's best uses (and most overlooked ones) is as an introductory programming environment for children. You can quickly show a child a program that creates 100 reflective transparent randomly colored spheres randomply positioned, and then show them how to change one or another of the parameters that control the apperance or number of spheres, and they can iteratively experiment with changes and rendering their results.
A nice sized group of us here at work recently picked up City of Heroes, and started playing together.
Yeah, this is the most fun I've ever had playing a computer game. I have level 20 and level 14 characters after nearly a month of play, and the game has continued to be consistently entertaining. The team play aspect is really what keeps it from getting boring, just as in most good MMO* games I think.
I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying 'Look honey, cute bears' but she just didn't bite.
The problem is you gave her a dumb game. Try letting her play CoH for a while (and you can play Zoo Tycoon if it's so great:-), then get her a computer that can handle it and you can play *together*. CoH seems to appeal to a fair number of women from what I've heard (friends who log out with the excuse that they need to let their wife play for a while, etc.)
Try to find a group of friends to play with who put in the same amount of time per week that you do. That way you don't fall too far behind in terms of level if you've decided to put less of your life into it. Of course CoH has a "sidekick" system where a higher level player can/sidekick a lower level player to let them be almost as effective as if they were the level of the higher character, but there are times when you really *need* to be compatible levels (Task Force missions, access to hazzard zones, etc.)
I think the ultimate product for stupid people will be pre-paid health insurance (coming soon to an HR department near you I'm sure).
Once you've paid for such a plan, it's in the provider's interest for you to die as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they get your money but don't have to provide any services in return.
The Microsoft pre-paid license program is just one step below this.
On the other hand, the typical business customer might actually like a way to pay for *not* having software updates, since constantly having to upgrade to the latest version is a pain in the neck, along with having to deal with the feature bloat that is required to otherwise motivate people to upgrade.
This is the business that RedHat has gotten into where in exchange for money they guarantee that the software you're running today will remain supported for a much longer period and you won't be forced to upgrade before you want to, and it's clearly the direction Microsoft is tring to move as they start running out of compelling feature-based reasons to upgrade from verison N to N+1.
So if you don't want things to change, by all means pay in advance, but if you're looking forward to new features, wait until the product actually ships before handing over your money.
What about the amazing story of the Amateur Radio satallite Ostcar 7 that was launched in 1974, operated for six years, then died due to a shorted battery, only to re-awaken from the dead in 2002 after 21 years of silence.
So we have satellites that work after having been dead longer than your satellites have been alive.
Nyeah.
G.
This may be the coolest thing I've ever seen
on
Space Elevators Going Up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was at that NIAC conference a couple years ago when Brad Edwards presented his Phase 2 results and I have to say this was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen.
Listening to him go through all the numbers and technical details you're left not only with the amazing scope of the thing but the feeling that, ya know, we might just be able to build this thing!
Slashdot Mirror
But from the top of the mountain there is no longer anywhere to go but down. And the air may be so thin at that altitude that it makes thinking clearly about the future difficult.
I've been playing WoW since beta (blah, blah), but I predict that in a few years we'll look back on the announcement of the forthcoming expansion as the peak in the life of WoW.
Note that in the past they announced subscriber numbers in even millions but now we have this 9.3 number. What's gone wrong that they didn't hit 10 million? After all, they've been continuously releasing the game into new markets over the last few years, so there has been a constant source of new players to help inflate the subscriber numbers.
WoW in the U.S. has been in decline for several months now. While there are many die-hard players who have been there for three years or more and will likely be playing WoW five years from now, there are also many many player who have gotten bored and have either moved on, or are now ready for a "next big thing" to come along at which point they'll jump so fast it will make Blizzards' heads spin.
There is an enormous potential opening in the market resulting from Blizzard's stumble. The window will likely last a year or two until Blizzard realizes they're in trouble and does something about it. It will be interesting to see if any of next year's big challengers is able to capitalize on this. Games like Age of Conan or Warhammer have a big opportunity, but will they be able to take advantage of it?
One of the biggest problems with new games (Lord of the Rings Online is a perfect example) is that in many cases they copy so much from WoW as to be almost indistinguishable from it. Someone who has gotten tired of WoW is unlikely to be inspired by a poor clone of it.
Blizzard has all the talent required to get back on track, but I think a significant shakeup in their design group will be needed. They can't just keep pushing another identical 10-level grind + new endgame raiding content on people every 18 months and expect them not to notice that it's just the same thing all over again.
The announcement of the new forthcoming expansion turned a lot of people off as simply being more level and gear inflation that will invalidate everything they've accomplished so far and make them go through the whole process again. Especially those people who were brought into gaming for the first time by WoW.
More of the same is no longer a recipe for success, and the new subscriber numbers suggest that the engines on the high-flying Blizzard ship have flamed out. Whether they can recognize this and get themselves restarted by coming up with something NEW will have to be seen.
If there's one thing that WoW suffers from it's the word "static". Everything is fixed, very little is dynamic. Dungeons are exactly the same every time you run them, and you need a fixed number of people and skills to beat them. Imagine if the dungeon layouts were randomly generated each time and the monsters and rewards automatically scaled to the number of people in the party and their abilities? In my opinion, it's only through major changes like this that Blizzard has any hope of returning to a growing subscriber base.
G.
...at least those flames will be beautifully rendered at incredibly high resolution and we'll all go "oooohhhhhh! ahhhhhhhhh!" as it plows into the ground and erupts in a huge fireball.
G.
Sorry, I RTFA and it was the worst heap of rubbish I've read all day.
It's author seems to be utterly and completely clueless about everything mentioned.
There's not a single thing that justifies the word "tying" that I can see. Microsoft have some OPTIONAL add-on set of services that you can install if you feel like it. It's not mandatory and they're not saying it will be. It's no more "tied" to Windows than any other piece of software.
I think I'm going to start a blog where I too post nonsensical tech stories with headlines solely designed to push the buttons of reactionary Slashdot readers, then clean up on the Google ad income.
G.
Seriously, this might be the most embarrassing product announcement I've ever seen.
G.
I'd just run Cat-6 cable rather than fiber or anything fancier, because, ya know, 640Mb/sec should be fast enough for everyone.
G.
A $600 minimalist Linux notebook that's a peripheral for a $300-$600 phone.
:)
Joy.
At 2.4 pounds it's as massive as an ordinary ultralight notebook that could run a full OS and applications. The sort of person would would go for this will already be likely to have a real notebook PC with them that can do all these same functions as well or better than this device.
It seems that almost all gadgets introduced as being a "new class" of device can be found a year later being sold by the pallete-load at bay area surplus and auction places. A year from now we can go in together on a lot of 100 of them for $1 each
G.
A Casual Player is anyone who plays less than you do.
A Hard Core Player is anyone who plays more than you do.
G.
...is simply that an MMO carries a monthly fee whereas the traditional games like Diablo and Starcraft included free online play once you bought the game.
Blizzard/Vivendi have gotten a taste of blood from the monthly revenue from 8 million WoW players and I predict they will not be introducing any new games that do not have a pay-per-month component.
So I would expect Starcraft/Diablo 3 to come out as online games where you pay $5-$10/month or something and in exchange you get a more dynamic multi-player environment than the standalone games but nothing quite as elaborate as WoW.
G.
You wonder if this will be on the pre-MRI questionaire soon. I guess as soon as a patient's hand flys through the window and smacks the operator in the face.
You might erase your credit cards everytime you hand one to someone.
And you'll never get rid of those damn iron filings.
G.
VB was a great beginner's language (when it was version 1.0 and was clean and simple and fully documented in a couple of relatively thin manuals that came in the box). But now the beginner may be overwhelmed by the available functionality and the documentation is now hundreds of megabytes of text available electronically.
Of course the same thing can be said about Java 1.0, and early versions of pretty much every similar language. As people demand to be able to do everything in a programming system it will eventually be come almost unusably complex no matter how simple and clean the original design and the first version were.
If someone wants to be a Windows programmer, or especially a professional VB programmer, then they have to start somewhere and VB is probably a fine starting place for someone moving into the world of Windows programming.
If you're interested in programming in general with less of a "Windows GUI Apps" concentration then there are lots of (probably better) options.
One I like to recommend for kids to get them into the basics of programming is POV-Ray for Windows which provides a very nice little IDE for writing programs that produce beautiful pictures when run. You can give a kid a program that draws a shiny sphere floating over a checkered landscape and then show them how to code a loop to make it 100 randomly positioned spheres, etc. and leave them to experiment with making changes to the program and seeing how that affects the output. Way more interesting than your average "Hello World!" in a window.
It's free too
G.
I concede, things are not bright sunshine and frolicking puppies for the gaming industry at the moment.
Nintendo seems to be doing quite well with the frolicking puppies, and it's always a sunny day in World of Warcraft (at least until the next patch that adds weather effects).
G.
Rabbits, toads, etc. Why is it always Australia that has these problems?
:-)
Because Tokyo finally learned to cover these things up
G.
OMFG! Giant Killer Toads taking over Australia! Say it isn't so!
Honestly, is this actually news to anyone?
You can learn pretty much everything you would ever want to know about the relationship between Cane Toads and the people of Australia in this delightful little movie:
http://www.cane-toad.com/
G.
...we're all spending every free hour playing World Of Warcraft and don't have time to play anything else.
G.
Any such game is definitely in the "fantasy" genre :-)
We hear this "user created content is the future" thing like every three months, and I think it's nonsense.
Sure, everyone would like to create a "Hello World!" MMOG and sit back and watch the players turn it into World of Warcraft.
Ha ha. Fat chance.
I'm still waiting for the glass I broke yesterday to reassemble itself spontaneously too.
Most players don't have that much imagination, most player created content will be crud (like 95% of everything), and even if it were good there's no way it would be *consistent*.
Sure, you might get a strong volunteer leader and an open-source style development success, but then you've just suckered people into working for you for free so I wouldn't really be betting my business plan on that happening, especialy if you're charging them $10/month for the privilege.
Look at the success of a game like World of Warcraft (5,000,000+ players at up to $15/month each) and then look at what went into creating that world (a huge five year development effort by hundreds of people). Now everyone wants in on that success but nobody wants to spend the time and money to do it right, so you get all these suggestions that user created content is the solution.
It will probably sucker in quite a few investors who think they're going to get WoW for free, but I'll be pretty surprised if anyone has a big success with it.
Yes, there *are* many very talented players out there, many who have better ideas than many game developers, but the trick is filtering the smart ones from the stupid ones, creating some sort of centralized continuity control to ensure consistency, etc.
One of the most critical things to any functional MMOG these days is creating and protecting an in-game economy. When you're letting players create the content that sounds even more difficult if you have to prevent any sort of exploit that would allow unbalancing the economy.
It's a fun fantasy, but I'm not holding my breath.
G.
Thank you for saying what I was really tempted to :-)
./ screamed so loudly for a response that included multiple instances of the word "fuck" (and all its various forms) as this one did.
/. subscription for now.
Never has an article on
I think I'll pass on renewing my
G.
Does Battlefield 2 include improved terrain/building damage? Indeed, such things will be the hallmark of future games.
No, unfortunately not.
You can put a tank round into a gas station and get nothing.
<marvin>
Where's the kaboom? THERE OUGHT TO BE AN EARTH SHATTERING KABOOM!
</marvin>
Anyway, the expansion which has already been announced is supposed to improve this somewhat, but in BF2 today there are only a handful of small items that you can actually damage.
G.
It amazes me that people keep suggesting that BF2 is this great example of what makes PC gaming better than console gaming.
I am a PC gamer and while I own most of the consoles, I never turn them on because I prefer the PC experience and my high-resolution cutting-edge graphics to playing on a "tee vee".
But Battlefield 2 was clearly designed from day one TO BE A CONSOLE GAME! Just look at the user interface. It's designed to be operated by a console-style game controller without any need for a keyboard, mouse, or any of the rest of the PC user interface.
The primary communication interface consists of a button-triggered popup menu of canned messages, and keyboard-based chat looks like an afterthought.
The user experience for this game will be identical in its console ports, and not because the consoles will be made to behave like PCs, but because the designers of this game went to a fair amount of trouble to make the PC behave just like a console.
The game may look better on today's PCs when compared to today's consoles, but this is simply due to the more modern (and several times more expensive) hardware in a current gaming PC. There may be other reasons why PC gaming is better than console gaming, but BF2 presents no examples (that I can see) of why this might be the case.
BF2 *is* a great game though, and is the first game of its type that actually convinced me to buy it.
G.
When I heard about this a couple months ago it was of course a new and uniqe gadget and so I couldn't resist ordering one. Got the second set of keys and a spare plastic top panel so you can swap between a couple key layouts quickly.
The hardware is well made, the keys are high quality, and the software works fine (running under XP SP2 on a Dell gaming laptop).
I haven't done that much with it really yet. I think the problem with the device is that it basically does a good job of putting a lot of buttons within reach of your hand, but then a $10 keyboard also does an excellent job of doing this.
But the product does what it claims to, so if you want lots of customizable buttons I would have no reservations about recommending the Ergodex.
G.
The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come,[...]
The problem with all of these endless new tape technologies is that after they come they (or their vendors) tend to become lethargic and lose interest in the whole process so that six months later they're trying to sell you yet another replacement technology.
That's fine for something like a computer that can run the same software each generation, but for tape devices the need to change media is like having to re-code your application in a new language every time you upgrade the computer. People don't want to do it.
Most customers want a backup media that will still be viable in at least seven years because of legal requirements. That can mean needing to be able to buy a drive that can read their tapes 5-12 years from now. How many of these new tape technologies will have that kind of staying power?
The standard 9-track 2400 foot open reel tape served the computer industry for about 30 years, providing a standard storage and interchange mechanism for pretty much every computer larger than a PC. The Internet has rendered the need for an interchange mechanism less critical, but the instability in the archival storage formats is now giving people serious headaches.
G.
POV is one of the greatest free software programs available, but people usually look at it the wrong way (IMHO).
What stops people generally is that it has no visual modeling facility. This leads people to believe that it is only good as a renderer where the input is created by some visual modeling tool like Moray, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While you certainly can use POV as an ordinary backend renderer, the true fun and power of the program comes with hand-written scene description files.
Yes, hand-written.
You can accomplish in 20 lines of POV code things that would take hours with a visual modeling interface. It's all about procedural descriptions rather than visual construction. Take some time and look through the many excellent sample scenes that are included, then start out by making small changes to the code and rendering them to see how it looks with your change.
Most of the best images created with POV were not done using a modeling program but hand written scene descriptions.
POV is a programming language for scenes the way C is a programming language for computer programs, and it really is a full-blown programming language (though a little unusual in places I will admit).
While things like modeling complex organic forms (the human body for example) are generally impractical to do procedurally, you can do just about anything else this way, and often much more easily and with more control than you would have positioning a lot of points in space iwth a modeling program.
And if you have any interest in the more abstract artistic kind of compositions, you can do just amazing things in a single page of POV code. The ability to use conditional and looping stuctures along with macros and functions in your scene description gives you amazing power.
And as far as GUIs go, at least POV for Windows has one of the best designed and most functional GUI interfaces that I've used. It's not a modeler, but as an interface to the POV renderer and even as a general purpose code editor it is superb.
One of POV's best uses (and most overlooked ones) is as an introductory programming environment for children. You can quickly show a child a program that creates 100 reflective transparent randomly colored spheres randomply positioned, and then show them how to change one or another of the parameters that control the apperance or number of spheres, and they can iteratively experiment with changes and rendering their results.
It's simple programming with a visual payoff.
G.
A nice sized group of us here at work recently picked up City of Heroes, and started playing together.
:-), then get her a computer that can handle it and you can play *together*. CoH seems to appeal to a fair number of women from what I've heard (friends who log out with the excuse that they need to let their wife play for a while, etc.)
/sidekick a lower level player to let them be almost as effective as if they were the level of the higher character, but there are times when you really *need* to be compatible levels (Task Force missions, access to hazzard zones, etc.)
Yeah, this is the most fun I've ever had playing a computer game. I have level 20 and level 14 characters after nearly a month of play, and the game has continued to be consistently entertaining. The team play aspect is really what keeps it from getting boring, just as in most good MMO* games I think.
I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying 'Look honey, cute bears' but she just didn't bite.
The problem is you gave her a dumb game. Try letting her play CoH for a while (and you can play Zoo Tycoon if it's so great
Try to find a group of friends to play with who put in the same amount of time per week that you do. That way you don't fall too far behind in terms of level if you've decided to put less of your life into it. Of course CoH has a "sidekick" system where a higher level player can
G.
I think the ultimate product for stupid people will be pre-paid health insurance (coming soon to an HR department near you I'm sure).
Once you've paid for such a plan, it's in the provider's interest for you to die as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they get your money but don't have to provide any services in return.
The Microsoft pre-paid license program is just one step below this.
On the other hand, the typical business customer might actually like a way to pay for *not* having software updates, since constantly having to upgrade to the latest version is a pain in the neck, along with having to deal with the feature bloat that is required to otherwise motivate people to upgrade.
This is the business that RedHat has gotten into where in exchange for money they guarantee that the software you're running today will remain supported for a much longer period and you won't be forced to upgrade before you want to, and it's clearly the direction Microsoft is tring to move as they start running out of compelling feature-based reasons to upgrade from verison N to N+1.
So if you don't want things to change, by all means pay in advance, but if you're looking forward to new features, wait until the product actually ships before handing over your money.
G.
What about the amazing story of the Amateur Radio satallite Ostcar 7 that was launched in 1974, operated for six years, then died due to a shorted battery, only to re-awaken from the dead in 2002 after 21 years of silence.
So we have satellites that work after having been dead longer than your satellites have been alive.
Nyeah.
G.
I was at that NIAC conference a couple years ago when Brad Edwards presented his Phase 2 results and I have to say this was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen.
Listening to him go through all the numbers and technical details you're left not only with the amazing scope of the thing but the feeling that, ya know, we might just be able to build this thing!
G.